2003 June

Archive for June, 2003

Anthony Valterra showed me a 36-page-or-so preview of the upcoming 192-page Book of Erotic Fantasy. From that small sample, I can say that the book seems about 50% relatively lame fan service (a Command Orgasm/Masturbation spell, with color photo illustration. Did the world need that? I’m thinking not), and 50% fairly interesting, more sophisticated stuff. The prestige classes are where a lot of the interest is – Anthony told me that co-author Gwen Kestrel is very big on classes that interrelate (quite appropriate for a sex book). The Dominator and Submissive prestige classes have abilities that complement each other, for example. There’s some sort of mage that can burn actual ability stats to achieve some effects, and s/he does well paired with a “sacred prostitute” class that restores ability scores. I asked if the sacred prostitute gave you 50 hit points if you got her alone in a van, but he didn’t get it.

When I saw the Kanji and the black and red motif, I thought Tenjo had a booth again and got all excited, but instead, it’s another intriguing board game with a samurai theme. Senjutsu, from a startup publisher called Salvador Games, puts your samurai guys on little octagonal bases that stack up, and have different icons printed on the side that faces you. These are items: staves, bows and arrows, big boots representing martial arts… they determine how the piece moves as well as what attacks it can make. There’s also the piece with a scroll on it, which is what your opponent wants to steal. It’s Stratego gone so wrong it’s right. This is one of the more exciting “new little board games” I saw, but why do all the Japanese-themed games use the same colors on the box? Nothing wrong with the colors, I’m just saying, is there something historical that I’m not aware of? ‘Cause Zendo (the new boxed edition of which doesn’t quite have a web page I can find) looks kinda all Japanese, even though it’s just the most brilliant and innovative abstract game you’ll see this year, and it uses green and white. So hey.

OtherWorld Creations has Mercenaries: Born of Blood (I think that’s the title) new at the show; it includes rules for making a mercenary out of virtually any creature in the Monster Manual. I’m thinking shambling mound.

Mystic Eye has a new Foul Locales book, Behind the Gates, about rural villages and hamlets and stuff. If there ain’t no Starbucks, it’s a foul locale indeed. They also have Tarot Magic, an intriguing idea if you ask me; they have stuff like prestige classes for tarot mages and all the surrounding bits for a magic system. Whether they have rules that actually require use of a tarot deck, I didn’t ask. No stats for the major arcana.

Played Creepy Freaks. Some folks don’t know that John Kovalic did some of the better character designs for this game, as well as Bazooka Joe-like comics for the boosters. I was surprised – this game has real meat to it, while still being totally approachable for its target market. Wiseman did a smart thing: he used the new square base for notating what the figures can do, not just how well they can currently do it. The clicky base is still there, but you don’t turn the base, you turn the figure; fully healed is facing forwards, “dead” (actually “scared” and leaving the board) is facing backwards. The clicks along the way are still hit points, but little icons will show up in some of them, representing types of attacks that the monster has become more vulnerable to at that click. Those types of attacks are also things that the monsters have in the corner of the square base, notating something they can do to others. The arrows (sort of) on the base show which directions the figure can move or attack in; a die roll determines how far. Basically, it’s a chess variant. A chess variant they’ll sell tens of thousands of; James Ernest must be pissed. I enjoyed it a lot and will be picking up a starter, although boosters are a little rich for my blood. ($5 for two figs: day-amn. Did I mention I got a box of Gregory Horror Show boosters for 75% off? Those figs are badass.)

Yes, I actually did go to the WotC booth and look at the D&D3.5 books. I’m not intimate enough with D&D to be able to say what’s changed – I can verify they still have lots of rules in them – but the new covers are nice. Also for sale at the show, and I don’t think it’s been in stores yet, is the Dragonlance campaign setting book. Purple cover: weird. Didn’t get a close look at that either, because I was too busy grilling a Wizards rep about D&D Miniatures. The “Entry Packs” – why do they have to come up with their own damn names for everything? – will have quick start rules that make use of the point values on the figure bases, and possibly do something interesting with the alignments thereon as well. Will the full rules be a separate book? Well, says the rep, there’s no “will be” about it – the full rules for D&D Miniatures are… D&D3.5. Whether this constitutes some kind of admission on WotC’s part that D&D3 is a skirmish miniatures game at heart is left as an open question for the more cynical among you. Would I ever think that, oh gosh, no. I believe the planned release date he told me was October.

Decipher announced this game what, a week ago? And they’re running demos here at the show. This newest salvo in the .hack multimedia assault (anime TV, anime features, PS2 games and now a CCG) has gameplay that will be familiar to players of, well, anything in the medium, but most explicitly the LotR game. For those unfamiliar with the .hack storyline, .hack//ENEMY is about a virtual reality experience gone horribly wrong. (I mean, come on, were you expecting it to do something else?) I was kinda intrigued by the fact that “mana” (it’s not called that) is basically whatever has that icon that you can see, anywhere on the board besides your discard pile. That introduces a lot of strategy, but not being a player of Decipher’s other stuff, I can’t say how new it is. The rest is extremely straightforward, without feeling dumb. Although I still think you could make a pretty quality game about all those power pills Pac-Man’s eaten over the years coming back from the grave to exact justice.

I was going to be all smooth and post the Origins Awards results live as they happened from the ballroom, but you can’t get signal in the ballroom… I’d have to sit in the hallway to be online. Well, OK.

Cedric’s survived his finals, and now that he can concentrate on more important matters, has sent in his review of Highthrone by Mongoose Publishing. What grade did he bestow upon the intriguing city supplement? I ain’t tellin’. Find out for yourself.

Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era is the big new deal from Green Ronin. It’s the first book in their Mythic Vistas line, which is all d20 settings in a not-typical-D&D-at-all-but-still-fantasy vein. The next book in the line, Skull & Bones, is in layout hell right now, but Mindshadows, about southeast-Asian psionicists with mad kung fu skills, ships in July. Also pretty new at the Green Ronin booth is Fang & Fury, the Interlock book for vampires and people who love them. They say they’ll have the traditional card game Torches & Pitchforks ready in, appropriately, October.

Diet Evil Games is doing this thing kind of like Flying Buffalo’s Origins Metagame last year, wherein one buys some play-stock in various participating game companies, and participating in those companies’ events will get them more stock, et cetera. People are only allowed to make one trade a day, because the Diet Evil booth wouldn’t be operational if they were always on Excel doing the math. So, here is the one price update so far at the show: Steve Jackson Games was Thursday’s biggest gainer, up $5 to $44 a share, and the highest valuation at $66 is Darcsyde Productions, which does Elric and Stormbringer supplements. Er, the starting valuations were determined randomly. That explains it.

If anyone at the show is reading this, you might want to go to the booth that’s selling all the old booster boxes? With the pink tags on them? Yeah. They have Z-G figures for $5 each. Buy all three and check out an ass-kicking game.

Kenzer and Company have the first D&D3.5 supplement, except that they don’t have it. They do expect it to be out a couple weeks before Gen Con, as well as a week or so before the actual D&D3.5 books.

Twilight Creations have yet another When Darkness Comes set at the show, as well as Dante’s Inferno, a boardgame about scraping sinners out of the ninth circle of hell and heading in to fight Lucifer. Each tile on the board has a color that corresponds to a resource, which you can use to do stuff like move to the next circle of hell, place new minions (I think), or move your opponent’s minions(!!!). Overall it sounds like Zombies-style fun in a Zombies! kind of timeframe. They also showed me a party card game – but wait, it gets interesting – called Say What, designed to be played during ordinary party conversation. This is a major survival characteristic for games for non-gamers, and will be selected towards pretty strongly, I think. It’s one to watch when it lands in September.